Buy it... if you specifically remember Danny Elfman's highly rhythmic, percussive underscore in the film itself.

Avoid it... if you expect either significant use of the original Lalo Schifrin theme or a similar expression of jazzy style in Elfman's score.

Elfman

Mission: Impossible: (Danny Elfman) In the film that confirmed Tom Cruise as an international action star, director Brian De Palma revises the classic Mission: Impossible television series and produces a hit on screen that would spawn two sequels. In the world of techno-gadgets, the computer has revolutionized the world of espionage, and the 1990's were the time to take advantage of that excitement in De Palma fashion; the lives of super-agents and double-agents benefit well from De Palma's sense of style-over-story, though despite the film's spectacular visual elements, the somewhat incomprehensible story caused many movie-goers to scratch their heads. The labyrinth of character relations, sub-plots, and technological ideas do thankfully yield in the end to sensational chase sequences that saves the film. The emphasis on style over plot is one that would seemingly have translated easily into the musical underscore for the film, but it didn't. Originally writing and recording a score for Mission: Impossible was Alan Silvestri, whose action music is typically strong, though his work for this particular project would turn out to be underwhelming to say the least (some have said that it is among the composer's most mundane works). With Silvestri's score rejected, Tim Burton collaborator Danny Elfman would take his first crack at a full-fledged summer blockbuster score outside the darkness of Burton's cover. His replacement score would reflect a general turn in the direction of his own maturing style, with 1994's Black Beauty serving as the final classically beautiful piece of his early career and 1995 yielding the more electronically unpredictable and stylistic To Die For and Dead Presidents.

It's no surprise that the rather elusive, rhythmically ambient music that Elfman produced for Mission: Impossible was originally considered a significant disappointment to collectors of his work. The degree to which those collectors still consider the Mission: Impossible score a disappointment depends on their opinion of the direction that Elfman's career continued to take into the late 1990's. A restrained and percussive work, Mission: Impossible dwells on significant use of inglorious percussion, light bass, dense orchestral accompaniment, and relatively little thematic development. Elfman seems to have been undecided (or perhaps under conflicting orders) regarding the use of his own thematic materials versus Lalo Schifrin's highly recognizable material from the original television series. In the end, the main Schifrin theme would receive one full, stylish performance at the outset, but disappear for most of the remainder of the score. In attempting to adapt the Schifrin theme with more pizzazz than Silvestri's bombastic recording had been, Elfman achieves the right amount of snazziness in the theme... but then blatantly changes the mood for the remainder of the score. For a concept made so memorable by a jazzy title theme, Elfman (and, to a lesser extent, Hans Zimmer and his hoard of ghostwriters in the first sequel score) would completely abandon that style in the rest of the work. This is despite Elfman's adaptation of a "plot" subtheme from the television series. Elfman's own thematic ideas are present, but become lost in the largely unfocused plethora of rhythmic underscore.

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The most curious aspect of Elfman's score is exactly the lack of "style" throughout the work; for a De Palma film especially, which relies on style over substance, Elfman's score is a largely dull and functional piece. If you think of the wildly snazzy sections of Ennio Morricone's work for De Palma's The Untouchables, you get a better picture of what Elfman's score could have used to some extent. Instead, when you hear the Mission: Impossible score apart from the film, even in its climactic train chase sequence (existing in the final cues of the album), the score is clunky, lifeless, and muted in its recording and mixing quality. A return to Schifrin's theme at the end of "Zoom B" is a welcome, overdue reunion. The one standout cue for Elfman is ironically the one that features the strongest connection to his previous works. For the crucial "Betrayal" sequence at the heart of the film, Elfman sets a melancholy choir over a stark electric bass rhythm and provides a nearly gothic interlude amongst all his percussive meanderings. While it may not be an absolutely crucial cue for Elfman collectors to have (though it is included on the second "Music for a Darkened Theatre" compilation album), it is a remarkable return to the mysterious music of Batman's roots, and stands out as a very awkward departure in Mission: Impossible. With bland action music and style-deprived suspense and mystery cues, this score is a surprisingly strange and disappointing miss for Elfman. The album situation for Mission: Impossible is also remembered as one of the early instances in which the studios strongly pushed a song compilation album for a summer blockbuster and held a score-only album for possible release at a later date. You hit some, you miss some... **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.18 (in 61 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.17 (in 115,373 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.